Dead Mountain by Douglas Preston

Author:Douglas Preston [PRESTON, DOUGLAS and CHILD, LINCOLN]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2023-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

31

CORRIE WALKED INTO her apartment and set her laptop and notebooks down on the worktable. What with the Gold interview and the drive there and back, it felt like a long day even though it was just half past four. High-profile or not, the Dead Mountain case was still full of humdrum work: checking off every lead, filling out paperwork, following up on useless tips. Bellamy, O’Hara, and the others had been out in the field all day, doing exactly that: currently, they’d moved on to interviewing people even tangentially connected with the case. Meanwhile, now that they’d spoken with Gold, she had assigned herself the problem of the knife.

Once she’d learned the initials “MHT” matched nobody in the Tolland family, she began looking farther afield. She’d hit upon the idea of calling the registrar at NMIT, to learn if there were any students with those initials around the time of the Manzano tragedy. She had managed to catch an administrator just before the registrar’s office closed, and it had taken a little standard-issue FBI pressure to loosen the bureaucracy, but in the end she’d been rewarded with a class list of students roughly contemporaneous with the fated nine. One name stood out: Matthew Hartley Tanner, who’d graduated in 2010 with a PhD in biochemistry. He now worked at a company outside Stanford, specializing in the vetting of new pharmaceutical applications for the FDA.

She put some water on to boil, then, checking her watch, turned on the TV. Amid the flood of streaming content, she’d accidentally found a local channel that, as if thumbing its nose at a dystopian present, stubbornly devoted afternoons to airing reruns of chestnuts like The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Lone Ranger, and Hogan’s Heroes. These brought back good memories to Corrie—afternoons when she got home from school, before her mom finished work, and she enjoyed their background murmur. Besides, she’d had a youthful crush on Clayton Moore—with his black mask and white-handled pistols—that hadn’t entirely gone away.

Corrie opened her laptop and updated her case log to reflect the work she’d done that day. Then she went over her notes and turned down the TV—just as the Lone Ranger was ordering Tonto, in a most un-woke manner, to ride into town—and made a call on her cell phone. She checked her watch: quarter to five, near the end of the workday—a good time to call.

“Tanner,” came the crisp voice on the other end of the phone.

“Is this Matthew Tanner?”

“This is Dr. Tanner. Who am I speaking with?”

“Dr. Tanner, my name is Agent Corinne Swanson. I’m with the FBI, and we’re investigating the recent developments in the Manzano case.”

There was a brief pause. “You mean the two bodies.”

“Yes.”

“Were they really two of the missing?”

“Yes. Beyond that, I’m afraid I can’t go into detail. The reason I’m calling is that a knife with the engraved initials ‘MHT’ was found in a location where some of the victims died. Since you attended New Mexico Institute of Technology around

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